A branded website is all about understanding your key visual elements, and ensuring the experience is as good as possible.

As a business, your brand is how your current and prospective clients recognize and think about you, your products and your services. A brand is more than just a logo. Branding is your typography, photography and imagery, should be featured prominently across every touchpoint where you’re engaging with customers, including your website. 

Every element you choose – colours, fonts, website layout – should provide context rather than confuse visitors. Regardless of your industry or business, developing a solid brand distinguishes your company from the competition and fosters a closer bond between you and your clients. 

Creating a Branded Website

Nail Down Your Brand Identity

Before designing your website, determining your brand elements is the first step toward creating a site that has the best impact at first glance. Answering the following questions can help you identify your values and develop a smart and realistic strategy for approaching your website branding: 

1. Who is your target audience?

2. Why are you launching your website?

3. What is your ultimate goal?

4. What is your unique selling point?

5. What makes you different from your competitors?

Identifying the right target audience is the most vital requirement of any marketing strategy. When you know your target audience and their pain points, you can craft a website and content tailored to their needs.

Based on your website goal and what makes your brand unique, you can consider what specific brand elements you want to include in your website and collateral. Creating a mood board can be a helpful resource when developing your website’s visual identity. Web designers use a mood board to set the tone, look, and feel of a website and how physical branding components such as logos and colours interact.

You can select colours, fonts, and design inspiration that aligns with your brand values and target audience with a mood board.

Brand Your Logo Design

When people visit a website, one of the first things they will likely notice is the logo. Your logo is an essential component of your brand’s identity and should communicate what you do and stick in the minds of those who see it. Communicating your company’s principles and personality through the visual components you use is important for developing your brand. 

Having a logo attracts attention, creates a powerful and memorable first impression, serves as the core of your brand identity, and distinguishes you from competitors. You want to make sure your logo stays on-brand and aligns with the products and services you offer, from colours to typography. 

Many websites have their logo functioning as a home button. Besides improving the user experience and navigation, setting your logo as a link to your homepage exposes your visual brand identity to anyone who navigates through your website.

Make Your Entire Online Presence Cohesive

Your branding must be consistent across all other platforms to truly design a great website. Your audience will be confused if you do not connect your material through branding. Your visual identity will appear fragmented and sloppy, affecting conversions and authenticity. 

Maintaining consistent branding across all of your channels guarantees that they will have the most significant impact and drive increased engagement to your website.

Here are some ways to keep things consistent:

• Choose one message to emphasize across your channels. It guarantees that the message is not diluted or muddled. Every interaction with a user is an opportunity to express who you are and what you stand for. For example, you might have a contact form that captures leads on your website, which you can use as the primary CTA on your social profiles, emails and more. You might have different initiatives to promote throughout the year, but the primary message should stay the same.
• Do your Instagram posts feel authentic and in alignment with your website? Ensuring that all of your communication channels stay on-brand will avoid leaving users confused and without a clear idea of who you are. Make sure you’re using the same brand voice and tone in your website copy and blog posts along with your social posts and other communications. 
• It’s not just what you say but also how often you say it. Keeping a steady cadence when communicating with your users helps reinforce your credibility. You don’t have to keep up with all channels, but make sure you frequently post on the most impactful ones. For instance, keeping your blog fresh and posting weekly can help increase your brand visibility.

Once everything is consistent, your website can serve as a hub to navigate each channel. Your audience should be able to jump to your social profiles for more information, read your blog, sign up for your newsletter and more. When everything links together and promotes a cohesive brand, you’re creating an excellent user experience online. 

Make Client and User Experience Part of Your Brand

By this point, you already know that branding is a crucial part of the design experience. A user can immediately recognize a brand’s website based on its logo design, font style, icons, and colours. First impressions happen within seconds, so you need to ensure your visual cues are clear and easy to absorb.

Suppose your users are confused about where to go on your site or overwhelmed with information. In that case, chances are they’ll be leaving your website before you’ve had an opportunity to surprise and delight them with your brand experience. The easier your website is to use, the more people will navigate your site and click CTA buttons or integrated contact forms.

Remember that customer experience is defined by the interactions and experiences your customer has with your business throughout the customer journey, from first contact to becoming a happy and loyal customer or client. Consider your ideal potential customer and how they’ll interact with your website. Make it easy for them to navigate and find information about your services, pricing, testimonials and more.

A poor experience is a big issue if a user is visiting your website to get in touch with you. You want them to find your contact form quickly and easily or any other way of getting in touch. 

Using a tool like HoneyBook, you can seamlessly embed a contact form onto your website that incorporates your branding and syncs with your client pipeline. You can build an automated workflow that immediately responds with more information or your scheduling tool to keep the conversation moving when anyone inquires.

Build Trust in Your Product or Service Online

Once you’ve caught the customer’s attention, the ability to retain them means communicating the value you provide and consistently delivering on your promises. Building trust in your brand is essential for any business operating online today. Ensuring you have a clean, efficient, and up-to-date website will foster brand trust. When users visit your site, they’ll find easy to consume and accurate information. Here are some of the key things to consider:

• When it comes to visiting a website, if it shows faulty graphics or broken images that interrupt the experience, this can translate to the user leaving the page in seconds. Make it a regular part of your website maintenance to check broken links, images, videos and other content on your site.
• You don’t want your homepage indicating one price and your pricing page showing another. Ensure all the information on your site is up-to-date and consistent, so no message is conflicting.
• Build trust with your potential users by showcasing your current customers’ experience with your products and services. Being open and honest about reviews you’ve received demonstrates transparency. It provides your users with the encouragement they need to complete a purchase.

Have a clean and clear layout: Keep things clean, clear and easy to read. While you can adapt to website trends, funky fonts and video backgrounds should be used sparingly to ensure that your website experience is as simple as possible.

Why Branding Your Website is More Than Just Your Logo

Incorporating your branding into your website design is all about understanding your key visual elements, what you want your users to do or feel when they visit your site, and ensuring the experience is as good as possible. Remember: Reducing friction, keeping things simple, and being consistent is just as important as having your logo and branding front and centre.